Phillips Still Looking Up at Trials : With Mills Leading, She’s Trying to Make Gym Team

Kristie Phillips, who didn’t seem to have much trouble with gravity when she was 14, now appears to be in a state of freefall at 16. What a difference two years can make. Once the sport’s considerable star, the next Mary Lou in the game’s argot, she has now settled in a less rarefied atmosphere. She’s the one looking up these days.

Thursday’s compulsory exercises, one-half of the Olympic trials scoring, at least didn’t see her plunge through the sport’s bottom. But the girl everybody assumed would be Retton’s replacement in our hearts, the future Queen of Seoul, certainly didn’t reclaim much altitude. Never mind her one-time rivalry with Coach Bela Karolyi teammate Phoebe Mills, the leader still. Phillips needs a miracle to make the six-women team.

“But I believe in miracles,” she said, ever cheerful, even after a less than spectacular performance. “And you just might see one Saturday.”

Phillips, who has changed coaches twice in an attempt to regain the form that had her top-ranked for 1986 and much of 1987, suffered a break on her uneven bars routine and scored 38.251 for the night. That score, combined with the U.S. championships score from last month, leaves her in eighth place, only a little improved over her ninth-place finish in the Houston meet.

“But my optionals are 100% improved since Houston,” she said.

No one else is so optimistic. Karolyi, the irrepressible Transylvanian, was somewhat somber when asked about her chances. He answered this way: “If I would be in charge, would be no matter about the top six scores. She is still the best beamer in the world and would be a pretty sure medal for this country.”

Reminded that he wasn’t in charge, Karolyi smiled sadly. “That won’t happen.”

Instead, we will probably see a combination of old and new faces. After Thursday’s scoring, 14-year-old Chelle Stack leaped into fourth place. Karolyi teammate Brandy Johnson, all of 15, went to fourth. And Kelly Garrison-Steves, team chaperone at 21, moved into second behind Mills, one more Karolyi product.

In sixth place is Utah’s Melissa Marlowe, a crowd favorite, cheered well beyond her achievements here. Doe Yamishiro, like Phillips behind her, remains separated from Olympic status so far by just hundredths of a point.

Mills, top-ranked these days, had the best meet of all, scoring a 9.975 on beam and a 9.95 on floor. But Garrison-Steves went full-bore and had no score lower than 9.775, that on vault. Garrison-Steves is that rare animal in women’s gymnastics, a sport that is more often girls’ gymnastics. She’s a National Collegiate Athletic Assn. product, a student at the University of Oklahoma, the only woman allowed in the Sooners’ weight room.

With this particular group, which seems to be getting even younger as it approaches the Olympics (neither Stack nor Johnson figured in this picture a year ago), she has little in common beyond scores. “We can’t talk politics,” she says, “they won’t watch the news.”

And it’s odd, when they start asking questions about boyfriends. Garrison-Steves, you might have surmised by the hyphen, is married. “I sure miss talking to Mark sometimes,” she says. “It’s great being 16, but I don’t always want to talk at that level.”

Still, she is not the stern elder in this group that she might be. She still travels with a favorite stuffed animal.

But Phillips’ failures seem somehow more interesting at this point than anyone’s achievements. The parabola of her career has been astonishing. On the cover of Sports Illustrated at 14, struggling to make the Olympics at 16. Still she remains optimistic and perhaps is right to be so, considering that she is less than one-tenth of a point behind the sixth-place gymnast.